Noel Grieg was an exceptional playwright renowned for producing high quality plays on a wide range of social issues, many involving themes around sexuality.

As Time Goes By (1977) documents segments of gay history from Victorian London to the Stonewall riots. The Dear Love of Comrades (1979) tells the story of radical gay socialist Edward Carpenter. And Poppies (1980), a play about relationships in times of war, which The Guardian called ” a time-shifting, futuristic vision of society on the brink of nuclear disaster and social breakdown.”

In 1985, Noel came to Nottingham to work with Perpectives Theatre Company on the development and production of a new play – Best of Friends.

Perspectives was a ‘Theatre-in-Education’ company. In other words, they did a lot of work in schools and colleges. And Best of Friends was a play about male sexuality in which a young gay man discovers that his apparently homophobic father had actually had gay relationships himself in his youth.

It was an important – and very real – issue but, inevitably, the local moral guardians began to stir at the prospect of ‘impressionable’ young people being exposed to the homosexual agenda.

I had the great privilege of doing a little bit of work with Noel during the development stages of Best of Friends. I was at that time already heavily involved in AIDS work and had been invited to discuss the issue with him and a few other members of Perspectives Theatre Company. I don’t remember much of the detail of the meetings, other than thinking what a lovely man he was.

In the end, it was decided not to include AIDS as one of the themes in the play; partly because it was recognised there were already enough ‘controversial’ issues in there already and partly because there would not have been enough time to fully explore it.

The issue wasn’t ignored entirely: I wrote a brief document on media coverage and moral panics as a teaching resource to accompany the play.

A PDF of this document can be downloaded from here.

Sadly, Noel Greig died on September 9, 2009 at the age of 64. His obituaries hailed not only his large canon of plays but also the work he did to inspire others in the fields of creativity and social action. I feel lucky to have met him, even if it was only briefly.